Simulated Patch Day Repop's

[fastboy21]

Originally Posted by Rogean [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Then it's not a simulated patch day... It would become a ... well not even simulated.. it would basically be every mob in the game randomly respawning at the exact same time. In order to simulate it like a patch day, it would have to be announced ahead of time. Typically it was estimated when the servers would come up from a patch in classic (usually after a 6 to 8 hour downtime), so it would be sometime in the afternoon... We would have to set a window and let everyone know what it is.

"All mobs will be respawning between 2 and 5 PM EST"...

Seems like kind of a cheat.

Then you don't actually have the downtime.. so people are on the server already, have been killing mobs.. waiting for the random respawn.. hell I bet you raiding guilds would already select out the first target they want and be poopsocking the hell out of it. And in the case of Dark Ascension with their bajillion strong raid force, they would most likely have split their raid force and be poop socking multiple raid mobs.

It wouldn't work out as well as you guys think it would.

Oh and don't even recomend taking the server down to accomplish this.. Raiding guilds are still the minority compared to the rest of the server and we aren't going to inconvenience the masses to appease you.

And I'd also like to mention, when the server is patched.. it happens typically overnight, and is down for 10-30 minutes, and is always unannounced ahead of time.

So....are you saying you don't like the idea? [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

/duck

[Lazortag]

Originally Posted by Rogean [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Then it's not a simulated patch day... It would become a ... well not even simulated.. it would basically be every mob in the game randomly respawning at the exact same time. In order to simulate it like a patch day, it would have to be announced ahead of time. Typically it was estimated when the servers would come up from a patch in classic (usually after a 6 to 8 hour downtime), so it would be sometime in the afternoon... We would have to set a window and let everyone know what it is.

"All mobs will be respawning between 2 and 5 PM EST"...

Seems like kind of a cheat.

Then you don't actually have the downtime.. so people are on the server already, have been killing mobs.. waiting for the random respawn.. hell I bet you raiding guilds would already select out the first target they want and be poopsocking the hell out of it. And in the case of Dark Ascension with their bajillion strong raid force, they would most likely have split their raid force and be poop socking multiple raid mobs.

It wouldn't work out as well as you guys think it would.

Oh and don't even recomend taking the server down to accomplish this.. Raiding guilds are still the minority compared to the rest of the server and we aren't going to inconvenience the masses to appease you.

And I'd also like to mention, when the server is patched.. it happens typically overnight, and is down for 10-30 minutes, and is always unannounced ahead of time.

Patches are equally as unpredictable here as on Live. As someone said before, even if they gave you an estimate that the server was going to be down for eight hours, it was rarely a reliable one. Sure, they told you longer in advance, but that doesn't change whether you have a real life commitment in the next eight hour window or not. I also don't think that patches being less predictable is that much of a bad thing.

I see the problem with simulating it while people are still able to access the server. That's fair. But if you do what I suggested (just respawning raid mobs every X number of patch days, where X is how many times more patch days we have compared to Live during the classic time period), then you don't have that problem. It wouldn't take long for someone to research what "X" is. Hell, I'll even do it if you want, it surely wouldn't take that much work.

Also, the fact that *most* patches happen at night, seems like an easy problem to solve, since that's largely a choice on your part (except in the case of emergency patches, which probably shouldn't count towards "X" mentioned earlier), and I'm pretty sure some arrangement could be made where you guys mix it up a little. Granted, it would make you the target of even more silly conspiracy theories as people try and allege that you're purposely restarting the server while some guilds have the least members on, so I can see why that wouldn't be fun. I still think we don't necessarily have to always patch during the time where the least players are on, and I don't think this is such a ludicrous idea that it shouldn't be considered further.

[Akame]

Originally Posted by Lazortag [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I still think we don't necessarily have to always patch during the time where the least players are on, and I don't think this is such a ludicrous idea that it shouldn't be considered further.

The idea behind bringing down the server when the least number of people are playing are to inconvenience the least amount of people. If Rogean says that the raiding guilds are a minority, then patching the server during prime to be a convenience to a minority of raiders, goes against that plan and something he appears to be loathe to do, which makes sense to me.

[Nealio]

Originally Posted by Rogean [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Raiding guilds are still the minority compared to the rest of the server and we aren't going to inconvenience the masses to appease you.

All I see here is a lot of double speak from Rogean on the issue. Please do not misunderstand, I am grateful for the hard work and effort put into the project, but this is a glaring issue wiht an apparent large number of players.

Raiders who might be inconvenienced by a change in the status quo by your own admission are a minority, and you want more players. Yet you turn around and say you are not going to alter anything to inconvenience the masses? The masses are inconvenienced by this supposed minority.

Instead of just popping in at random and defeating everyones suggestions flatly, is there a current roundtable discussion amongst the "dev's" to resolve this issue?

[Dumesh Uhl'Belk]

Originally Posted by Rogean [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Then it's not a simulated patch day... It would become a ... well not even simulated.. it would basically be every mob in the game randomly respawning at the exact same time... and is always unannounced ahead of time.

Ok, thank you for the full response. I now see that you and I had very different concepts in mind when reading the phrase "simulated patch day respawns." So, let me discard that nomenclature and just tell you what I was thinking about.

Here is my ideal situation.

I am thinking about a script that can run in the background. It should have maybe a 3% chance of triggering each day at noon eastern, but not unless it has been at least 8 days since it last triggered. When the script triggers, it should do the following:

1. changes the server MOTD to some text similar to "Fake Patch Day Tomorrow - Not really a patch, we're just respawning the raid mobs, haha"

2. the following morning at 8am eastern, it will broadcast "Fake Patch starting, estimated raid mob repop is XXX" where XXX is a value between 2 hours and 12 hours and change the Server MOTD to "Fake Patch is underway, estimated raid mob respawn is YYY" where YYY is 8am eastern + XXX.

3. the script will decide when to do the respawn and that actual time will be XXX +/- 2 hours. 15 min before the script is going to respawn the raid mobs, it should broadcast a message in all planar zones and other zones that will have mobs respawned (sol b, permafrost, kedge, west freeport), that "Zone will be repopped by the Fake Patch in 15 minutes". Then, at the time dictated by the script, the planes will be fully respawned (including the 7 day spawn of the Noble Dojorn). Vox + ice giants, Nagafen + fire giants, Phinigel + swirlspine guardians, and Sir Lucan will respawn and thus reset their spawn timers, and a server broadcast will go out saying something like "Fake patch complete, enjoy your raid mobs."

Also, unrelated to the script, all those raid mobs whose spawn timers are a multiple of 24 hours will have variance removed and instead have a flat 6 hours added to their spawn time.

With a full repop it would be pretty dangerous in most places to keep your raid force in the plane through the respawn event, although the non-kos islands in sky would be an exception.

This proposal will result in about a 10% chance of having 2 or more patches in a month, never closer to each other than 7 days, ~ 60% chance of 1 or more patches a month, and an 84% chance to have at least 1 patch per 60 days.

Obviously, the specifics for the chance this can happen could be altered to the developers' taste or to try to match classic patches as closely as possible if someone wants to do more research on exactly how often they happened.

My SQL-fu is perhaps not up to the task, at least not without some reading and research which I admit, I do not have the time to do currently. Perhaps someone else in the community would volunteer to help the developers code this?

In closing, I believe this proposal will have no impact on the casual playerbase (besides a few lines of text in their chat window ever couple of weeks). This proposal will also mimic the classic patch day spawn races. It will allow for the simultaneous spawning of enough targets to make it much more difficult for a single guild to monopolize. It will reduce camping by making the next spawn time a known time for people and groups that do their scouting. It will also rotate the spawn times through the time zones so that they do not favor one group of players over another based on geography.

[President]

Pretty much any way you simulate patch day repops would be more classic than it is now. I would honestly prefer you remove variance, and do a simulated patch day 0-3 times per week, either in the morning, afternoon, or middle of the night, without notice(since, as you put it, having a patch without the server coming down is not quite fair). Even that, right there, is more accurate to classic than what we have now.

I can't imagine DA and IB would agree with this as well, as they are only set to gain from this, and get more sleep.

[Bushwick]

Originally Posted by Dumesh Uhl'Belk [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

1. changes the server MOTD to some text similar to "Fake Patch Day Tomorrow - Not really a patch, we're just respawning the raid mobs, haha"

Anything more than a fifteen minute warning guarantees that IB and DA will dominate the competition. Dragons die quickly, planar raid targets are untouchable for fifteen minutes to 2 hours. Give either guild time to prep for the dragon kill and they will be through with it in time to (out-)compete with the other guilds rushing through Hate and Fear.

Random, unannounced server-wide respawns of raid content still sound really great to me.

[Scratch&Sniff]

Originally Posted by Rogean [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

"All mobs will be respawning between 2 and 5 PM EST"...

Seems like kind of a cheat.

Then you don't actually have the downtime.. so people are on the server already, have been killing mobs.. waiting for the random respawn.. hell I bet you raiding guilds would already select out the first target they want and be poopsocking the hell out of it. And in the case of Dark Ascension with their bajillion strong raid force, they would most likely have split their raid force and be poop socking multiple raid mobs.

It wouldn't work out as well as you guys think it would.

this is why rogean = smart people

[Molitoth]

Originally Posted by Rogean [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

And in the case of Dark Ascension with their bajillion strong raid force.

Have you seen the IB/DW/Pantheon alliance?

[Harrison]

Originally Posted by Molitoth [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Have you seen the IB/DW/Pantheon alliance?

Three guilds, all with talent in their ranks.

DA, lacking three guilds worth of talent in their three guilds worth of members.